The promo poster for Biohackers: Mia Akerlund standing in front of Tanja Lorenz, both tinted in purple and blue with bubbles floating around themImage via Netflix
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Jennie Richardson
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Jennie Richardson is a TV Features and Lists Writer for Collider, and a graduate student pursuing an MFA in Fiction Writing. In other words, she really loves stories.
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From Westworld to Severance to most recently Pluribus, some of the best science fiction shows explore what happens when technological advancements go too far. While Westworld and Severance tackle themes of autonomy with a focus on those who were created for the convenience and pleasure of humans, Pluribus revolves around a regular person trying to keep from being assimilated into an alien hivemind. As a genre, science fiction offers a clever way for TV shows to explore the possibility of different impressive technological advancements and the inevitable downside that these would have on humanity.
Many sci-fi shows have a huge audience, and rightfully so, but some of these series tend to go under the radar without getting the attention that they deserve. One such series is Netflix's German 2020 sci-fi series, Biohackers, about one college student trying to expose a corrupt system in a world of booming biohacking and bodyhacking technology. Biohackers was sadly short-lived and cancelled after just two seasons, but it is still one of the most clever and disturbing science fiction series of the last decade.
What Is 'Biohackers' About?
Mia sitting in Jasper's arms in BiohackersImage via Netflix
Biohackers opens with a scene of two college students, Mia (Luna Wedler) and Niklas (Thomas Prenn), riding the train together. They are holding hands and sharing a sweet moment, until another passenger suddenly asks for medical help. Mia, who's pre-med, tries to step in, but everyone on the train is quickly infected with a mysterious virus – including Niklas. The series' main storyline then picks up two weeks earlier, just as Mia is starting school at the University of Freiburg. The series takes place in the present day, but the university is overrun with biohacking and bodyhacking technology. For fun, Mia's friends and peers create glow-in-the-dark plants, pills that can help a person breathe underwater, and other clever hacks to make life a little more interesting.
Mia is at the University of Freiburg with a purpose, though. Her real name is Emma Engels (Nina Zorzi), and when she was ten years old, her twin brother, Ben (Simon Tiefenbacher), died of a genetic disease. On the night he died, Ben went to the Emergency room, where Dr. Tanja Lorenz (Jessica Schwarz) treated him. Emma later heard her father (Sabastian Gerasch) blame Dr. Lorenz for Ben's death. Her parents even had evidence against Lorenz, but when they were going to bring it to a journalist, she orchestrated a car accident that killed them. Lorenz believed that Emma was dead, but Emma went to live with her grandmother, and she changed her name. Now, Mia is taking a class with Professor Lorenz, and she's determined to use Lorenz's TA, Jasper (Adrian Julius Tillman), to get closer to her and find the answers she's looking for.
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Posts 2 By Kareem Gantt Oct 11, 2025While Mia builds a life for herself at the University of Freiburg through her new friend group, a love triangle, and a position working for Lorenz, she gets in way over her head with her plan and nearly gets caught on a number of occasions. She starts off using Jasper to gain access to Lorenz's technology, but she develops a real romance with him. At the same time, Mia becomes closer to her housemates, and she starts to reconsider her feelings for Niklas, who is Jasper's roommate and best friend. As Mia becomes wrapped up in Lorenz's world, she also gets more answers about what happened to Ben, but in the process, she puts herself in a dangerous position that could get her killed and ruin the new connections that she has built.
'Biohackers' Scarily Realistic Premise Will Change Your Perception of Reality
Biohackers utilizes multiple timelines to tell the story of Mia's past and to hint at what is to come in the future. It's the main timeline that is the most compelling and unsettling, though. The more time Mia spends in Lorenz's lab working on experiments and investigating her, the deeper she gets involved in a complicated biohacking conspiracy. Mia learns shocking information about her own past, as well as Ben's, that upends everything she thought she knew. All the while, her friends continue to experiment with even more alarming and bizarre types of biohacking and bodyhacking. Biohackers will definitely have fans wondering about the possibility of this technology and these viruses, and about how possible all of these terrifying technological advances are in reality.
Professor Lorenz may be at the center of Mia's questions, but she is just one of many people in the world of Biohackers. Many of the characters have shocking secrets, and many of the different experiments in Lorenz's lab are even more complex and shocking than they seem. Without going into too much detail, Biohackers' second season takes some major risks and changes the whole ballgame for the show, leaving Mia with even more questions just as she starts to get some of the answers that she has been pursuing. Like other great science fiction shows, Biohackers also uses its technology to explore deeper themes like autonomy, the concept of humans playing God, and the question of how far technological advances can go until they become unethical and destructive.
Biohackers is a twisty, suspenseful science fiction series that slowly reveals more pieces of the puzzle over time, so that viewers, like Mia, are often left in the dark about everything that is going on. The entire first season builds up to the first scene in the show, where Mia and Niklas get caught in the middle of a dangerous outbreak. As Mia gains Lorenz's trust and spends more time in her lab, the show also provides more information about her past and future that recontextualizes the events of the present. The result is shocking and horrifying, and will have viewers on the edge of their seats until the show's very last episode.
Biohackers is available to stream on Netflix.
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